Latin American Perspectives

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Controlling State Power : An Interview with Vice President lvaro Garca Linera
Linda Farthing
Latin American Perspectives 2010 37: 30
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X10370174

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 Controlling State Power
An Interview with Vice President
lvaro Garca Linera
by
Linda Farthing

At the end of a two-hour interview I conducted with Bolivian Vice President

lvaro Garca Linera in La Paz on June 20, 2009, I asked whether he had any-
thing he had written recently that he would like to see published in English in
Latin American Perspectives. He pulled out his latest book, La potencia plebeya:
Accin colectiva e identidades indgenas, obreras y populares en Bolivia, produced in
collaboration with Pablo Stefanoni (Buenos Aires: CLACSO-Promoteo, 2008),
and pointed to the last essay, Bloque de poder y punto de bifurcacin, writ-
ten just before the recall referendum that not only reaffirmed both President
Evo Morales and Garca Lineras mandate but also proved to be a significant
defeat for the right. LAPs translation of this essay appears in this issue.
Garca Linera emerged as one of Bolivias leading intellectuals during the
late 1990s after he had spent five years imprisoned for his role in the Ejrcito
Guerrillero Tupac Katari (Tupac Katari Guerrilla ArmyEGTK), which rejected
Che Gueveras foco theory in favor of mass insurrection. Raised in Cochabamba
in a middle-class family that had been part of the rural landowning elite until
the 1953 agrarian reform, he had been politicized as a young man by wide-
spread popular resistance to the Banzer dictatorship (19711978). In the early
1980s, while studying mathematics at the National Autonomous University in
Mexico City, he was active in Central America solidarity work and became
intrigued by debates over the Mayas role in Guatemalan revolutionary strug-
gles. Always a voracious reader, he began to read social science broadly, focus-
ing on the search for a Marxist interpretation adapted to Andean reality. Back
in Bolivia, he continued what had become an obsession: to challenge the lefts
stilted and mechanistic class analysis and develop a theory that articulated
Marxism with Bolivias emerging indigenist discourse and movement.
By the end of the 1990s he was teaching sociology in La Pazs public uni-
versity and was a founding member of Comuna, a radical intellectual forum.
He increasingly became a public intellectual, appearing for four years as a
panelist on the La Paz television program El Pentgono. Generally identified
with the more indigenist rival to Evo Morales Felipe Quispe, he surprised
many people when he agreed to join Evo Moraless ticket in 2005 as vice
presidential candidate. With his European racial features, dressed in a suit,
and projecting a cultured and sophisticated image, he has taken on a role of
mollifying Bolivias upper and middle classes, terrified by an indigenous-
run government. However, even while he has played the role of mediator in
disputes with the right, his radical discourse has been modified by the prag-
matism necessary to run a small, historically dependent country.

Linda Farthing has written extensively on Bolivia as well as other parts of Latin America.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 173, Vol. 37 No. 4, July 2010 30-33
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X10370174
2010 Latin American Perspectives

30
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 Farthing / CONTROLLING STATE POWER 31

What follows is an excerpt from my interview that complements the themes

raised in the August 2008 essay printed below.

You have lived almost all your life in opposition to the existing government. How
has your perspective changed in your role as vice president?

Actually, the experience of being in the government has mostly reaffirmed

the things that I believed and argued long before I ever imagined that I would
participate directly in the state. In particular, Pierre Bourdieus concept of the
states monopoly on symbolic power has had increasing resonance, helping
me understand how the state functions. Robespierres writings on the transi-
tion from a monarchy to a republic has also assisted me in interpreting the
process we are undergoing, as have Lenins writings from 19181919, in which
he discussed the role of the bureaucracy, the lack of political cadres, and the
need to activate the traces of productive self-determination in the midst of
adverse circumstances.
Being physically located within the state has decidedly enriched and deep-
ened my political and intellectual perspectives. What I didnt grasp and I
think other leftists dont really understand very welland have not studied
very muchis the absolute importance of controlling the states economic
power. Within the context of this small country, we wield considerable power
to shape the economy and the economic circumstances of much of the popula-
tion. Utilizing this power allows us to significantly shape the Bolivia of the
future.

Could you discuss the challenges of decolonizing a state after 500 years of colonial
processes? What are the specific challenges that 20 years of neoliberalism have brought?

We live in a deeply colonial and racist society. These historical relationships

shape and define all the interactions that take place on a daily level, from the
way you address people, the use of public space, even who gets precedence in
public transportation. Every one of these interactions reflects a deeply strati-
fied society. None of us has any doubt that it will take decades to get rid of
these deeply etched internalized colonial relations.
But within the government, although the process is slow and halting, we
have begun to take some important first steps. We have put indigenous people
in the government in record numbers and appointed them to positions they
never held before. This is significant in this society, in which previously all
that indigenous people could aspire to was being a small farmer or perhaps a
petty merchant. Now an indigenous person can be anything from president to
a construction worker. That is a huge change and is a first step to transforming
the nature of the state and the relationships between the state and the rest of
society.

How do you understand the differences between a party led by social movements
and a traditional leftist party?

Look at Marx in the rebellion of 1848: He did not speak of a political party that
was highly defined. He spoke of a party made up of workers. While Lenin wrote

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32 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

about a highly centralized, disciplined party, he also emphasized the importance

of expanding and consolidating worker control and communal production struc-
tures. So why do we need to have a narrowly defined political party now? Why
not a more flexible and fluid body? We recognize that there are certain weak-
nesses in having a party whose ruling body is made up of the heads of the coun-
trys social movements. We lack a disciplined political cadre, and this is a serious
limitation for the MAS [Movimiento al Socialismo] at present. What we have is
strong leadership at the top with thin threads of cadres emanating from it, but the
bulk of the membership is made up of grassroots people without much political
formation. We are well aware of this and are doing our best to address it.
Of course, a key result of the structure of the MAS and of our political and
social history has been deeply shaped by a long-standing corporativism in
Bolivia. People believe that if they have worked for the party, they deserve
something in returna job or access to certain privileges. Evo has said repeat-
edly to social-movement leaders that they should not expect anything from
the government, and this often provokes disgruntlement and questioning. He
insists that they need to deepen their commitment to the process of social
change without seeking personal gain. This is hard for many to accept because
that is not the way things have ever been done here. So of course corruption
and clientelism continue, and addressing it repeatedly takes up an enormous
amount of our time and energy. We have no choice but to stay on top of it all
the time.

How do you explain the current weaknesses of the right in Bolivia after its failure
in the August 2008 recall referendum and the passage of a new constitution?

One must never take a self-satisfied approach to a victory over the right.
Even when the left wins, as we have, the right will always find a way to
regroup, attempt to take power, and impose its agenda once again. Our real
problems with the right began once we started attacking their privileges and
particularly those who have massive landholdings in the eastern part of the
country. By this point, the right was mostly bankrupt in terms of a viable
national project and had no new ideas to offer. However, it was successful in
appropriating the banner of regional autonomy, which is a long-standing and
legitimate demand in Bolivias regions, and effectively rallied people around
it. During this time, as the right was gaining power, we had compelling evi-
dence that the United States was actively involved in supporting it, and this is
what precipitated our asking Ambassador Goldberg to leave the country in
September 2008.
The right also made concerted efforts to destabilize the country and bring
down our government by attempting to cut off food supplies produced by
large agricultural enterprises in the east. But we quickly established relation-
ships with small producers and provided them credit and other supports to
strengthen their sector and ensure that the government could never again be
subject to threats by the large producers. Then the right invested a huge effort
to undermine the Constituent Assembly, using racist attacks to broaden its
support. We took a rather passive role during this time, convinced that it was
likely to hang itself with its own rope.

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 Farthing / CONTROLLING STATE POWER 33

The rights first effort to reestablish itself on the national stage was
the recall referendum that called for a vote of confidence in the president,
vice president, and departmental prefects, held in August 2008. It lost
decisivelywe increased our support from 54 percent in the 2005 national
election to 67 percent, and two departmental prefects associated with the
right lost their seats. Then, in September 2008, the right provoked a massacre
of indigenous protesters in the northern Amazonian department of Pando,
and this event combined with sporadic racist violence turned the bulk of
public opinion against them.
This was what I call a point of bifurcationa point where a political situa-
tion comes to a head and significantly changes the future course, much as it
did in another September, that of 1986, when 15,000 miners marched on La
Paz in the March for Life and were forced to turn back before they reached the
city because the government deployed a huge number of the military to block
their way. Both cases, one a victory for the right that marked the defeat of state
capitalism by neoliberalism and the other a decisive loss, involved not the
deployment of the states monopoly on coercion and violence but rather the
threat of it. In 2008, we seized the opportunity of the recall referendum to
retake the initiative and demonstrated clearly to the right that we were willing
to take aggressive action against it. Prior to this we had acted pretty leniently,
but we learned the hard way that you cannot leave your enemies only half
defeated.

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